Tadaa builds on Instagram’s template with more Twitter-like features for social photographers

In the eleven months since Instagram launched, we’ve seen mobile photo sharing explode via countless apps hoping to grab users with their own take on easy taking and sharing of photographs. One of the latest contenders to emerge is Tadaa.

Hailing from Hamburg, Germany, the team behind Tadaa have built an app that on the surface offers similar functionality to Instagram (take a photo, add a filter, post it to other social networks and see what other users are posting), but adds its own tweaks which make it well worth a look if you’re a serious photo sharer.

While Instagram’s mobile app currently has limited acknowledgement of a wider community of users other than the people you follow, Tadaa’s opening screen lets you see highly rated photos from other Tadaa users from both the last 12 and 36 hours, as well as posts from new users, helping them gain an audience early on, right from the app.

What the Tadaa team really wants is for its app to be considered the ‘Twitter for photos’. To this end, the latest version of the app, which has just been released today, adds a reshare feature that allows you to share other people’s images which you like in your own feed, spreading them further in a similar way to a retweet on Twitter.

Other interesting social features include the ability to reply to a photo with not only a comment but a photo response. Meanwhile, the developers say that it’s the fastest camera app on the App Store, and the resolution isn’t too shabby either. Photos taken with Tadaa are saved locally at 2048×2048, and uploaded at 1200 pixels along their longest edge (width or heights or both depending on whether it’s a portrait, or landscape or square photo). This compares well against Instagram’s 1936×1936 local files and 612×612 uploads.

One feature that isn’t quite ready for prime time is the ‘virtual currency’, Tadaa Dollars, which appear on your profile. The more likes and comments you get, the more Tadaa dollars or ‘tollars’ you get. You receive two for a ‘like’, one for a comment. At present, it is just a way to show how popular you are on the service, but there are plans to develop this into something bigger in a future release.

So, Tadaa definitely has points in its favor, but it’s a shame that its current strongest suit, the social features that encourage sharing of images, replying with images and ‘retweeting’ images, are buried in the interface, requiring some learning to get to them.

Tadaa is playing in a competitive market and every entrant risks being tagged an ‘Instagram clone’, but even if you label this app as such, it’s a solid image sharing app that just needs a little tweaking to bring its strengths to the surface. Creating a little more distance from what Instagram does (perhaps by developing Tadaa dollars further) will give the app solid grounds for success.